Tudor dynasty

“ The Tudor dynasty filled the throne of England for a hundred and eighteen years. A hundred and six years of that period belong to the reigns of Henry VII., Henry VIII., and Elizabeth, three rulers of consummate ability. No other reigning house has maintained so high a level of governing faculty during so large a proportion of its existence, and it is not the least part of the wonderful good fortune of England that her destinies should have been directed, at a time of change and growth, by sovereigns of eminent capacity. ”

“ This plain business of securing himself on the throne was necessarily the first consideration. Only an established dynasty could restore steady government in a country which within a hundred years had seen four kings slain and the great bulk of her ancient baronage wiped out. Between foreign wars, successful or the reverse, and a wild warfare of armed factions at home, stability had been destroyed. The prolonged reign of strong rulers maintaining one policy was an absolute condition of recuperation. The way in which Henry secured it was entirely characteristic and entirely successful. ”

“ Though the character of the Tudors was absolutely despotic, no dynasty since the days of Alfred and Magna Charta wrought out such revolutions in the constitution of England. These revolutions were partly effected by the very efforts of the Tudor monarchs to establish their own power and gratify their own self-will, but were due also to the fact that the Tudor despotism was essentially popular, and encouraged manifestations of the national will. These revolutions extended not only into the political constitution of the nation, but into its religious one ”

“ But when Perkin and Warwick were both put to death at the end of 1499, there was no arguable case for any one outside Henry's own domestic circle. Even if it were held that Henry's title was invalid, and that a woman could not herself reign in her own right, Elizabeth's son had indisputably a title prior to any other possible claimant. It was stated, though the truth of the statement is doubtful, that the Spanish sovereigns had never felt at ease as to the stability of the Tudor dynasty till November, 1499 ”

“ In after years—like Lord Daubeney—when Henry was firmly seated on the throne, and order largely restored, Lord Willoughby de Broke was probably a careful and cautious courtier, steering clear of the intrigues that stalked about Henry's court (and infested the Tudor dynasty to its close) , one who studied the mercenary, selfish policy of his royal master, and made himself generally useful as opportunity and circumstance occurred, and in return was rewarded with honours, accompanied by grants of his neighbour's confiscated lands, which cost the generous monarch he served, nothing to bestow. ”

“ This very church of Holyhead was in great part rebuilt in the time of Henry VII. son of that Edmund Tudor. The rose of the Tudor family is visible to this day on its walls. Owen Tudor, the ancestor of them all, was a native of this island of Anglesey. We are thus reminded of the fact, which we sometimes forget, that, after Saxon and Norman and Plantagenet had done their best and passed away, a Welsh and British dynasty at last was seated once more on the throne of Britain, p. ”

“ It was a scheme of “all in all or not at all;” for them and their dynasty it ended in “not at all.” French history is brimful of “great acts of constructive genius” and has none of the products of development. For Celtic history is indeed a sad succession of fits, [Pg 52] and not a process of quiet growth. How a succession of fits will end, and how growth will end, it is not difficult to foretel.
The government of peoples is for the most part and in the long run that which they deserve, that which they are best fitted for, and not at all that which, it may be, they wish for and cry out for. ”

“ Born about the middle of the fifteenth century, she lived—when the Plantagenets had been displaced by the Tudors, and the Tudors succeeded by the Stuarts—to affirm, in the seventeenth century, that, in her youth, she had danced with Richard at his brother's court, and that he whom historians had, in deference to Tudor prejudices, represented as a monster of ugliness, was in reality the handsomest man in the room except his brother Edward, and that he was very well made. ”

“ The insurrection succeeded, though Buckingham himself perished in the enterprise; and the Earl of Richmond, became Henry VII, king of England. On so accidental a circumstance depended the accession of the house of Tudor to the English throne, and the consequences, which followed it, so important to the interests of this great empire.
It was during the sovereignty of the house of Tudor that one of the most important events in the history of our country took place, viz., the Reformation, commencing in the reign of Henry VIII., and being completed in that of Elizabeth. ”

“ Tudor policy, was employed to complete the ruin of the old English peerage which the Wars of the Roses began: and by 1509 there was only one duke and one marquis left in the whole of England. [71] Attainder not only removed the particular traitor, but disqualified his family for place and power; and the process of eliminating feudalism from the region of government, started by Edward I., was finished by Henry VII. Feudal society has been described as a pyramid; the upper slopes were now washed away leaving an impassable precipice, with the Tudor monarch alone in his glory at its summit. ”

“ A people ready—fairly and throughout all strata ready—for that which they demand will not long demand in vain. Our fathers, under the Tudor Henrys and the Tudor Elizabeth, had the rule which was best fitted for them, which they asked for, which they deserved—a significant morsel, by the bye, of racial circumstance. It by no means follows, let it be noted, that what people and king together approved of was the ideal or the wisest. It is with policies as with all things else, the fittest, not the best, continue to hold the field. ”

“ Was not Clarence your ruler, and Edward of England monarch of your isle? In the name of these, in the name of the White Rose and Mortimer and Plantagenet—I, the son of Edward the Fourth, the victim of my uncle Gloster's treachery, and low-born Tudor's usurpation; I, named in my childhood duke of York and lord of Ireland, now, if rightly styled, Richard the Fourth of England, demand my lieges of Cork to acknowledge my rights, to rise in my cause. I, a prince and an outcast, place myself in their hands, through them to be a fugitive for ever, or a king. ”

“ It is simply inconceivable that the growth within the realm of such an organisation as is here depicted would have been permitted; or that, if there, it would not have been sternly repressed by Henry VII.; or that if it had survived the first Tudor, the second would have suffered it to flourish unregarded for eighteen years of his reign. The exaggeration is so flagrant that we can hardly infer from it even a substratum of truth. ”

“ A strictly home and national policy was immediately established by this most remarkable of our sovereigns, and pursued through good report and evil report, sometimes at the expense of her feelings—if she was so little of a Tudor as to have any—of tenderness and compassion, sometimes at the expense—and here she was Tudor enough to have very acute sensations indeed—of her personal and official dignity, but always with the one object of establishing a great united and irresistible bulwark against foreign oppression and domestic disunion. ”

“ Thus they execute the will of the ruthless Tudor, the Nero of English history; well, he and his victims have long since met before a more awful bar.
The winds blow ceaselessly all through the night, but in the morn the clouds are breaking; in the east a faint roseate light appears, and soon brighter streaks of crimson fringe the clouds, which hang over the dawn; anon the monarch of day arises in his strength, the shadows flee away, and from the summit of the hill a vast extent of sea and land is beheld, rejoicing in his beams. ”

“ Left without chiefs who had any decent show of right, the adherents of Lancaster rallied round a line of bastards, and the adherents of York set up a succession of impostors. When, at length, many aspiring nobles had perished on the field of battle or by the hands of the executioner, when many illustrious houses had disappeared forever from history, when those great families which remained had been exhausted and sobered by calamities, it was universally acknowledged that the claims of all the contending Plantagenets were united in the house of Tudor. ”

“ Long before the close of his reign, the first Tudor had made himself a person of very considerable importance, whom none of the continental Powers dreamed of ignoring, and with whom they treated on something very like equal terms. This, however, was in no small degree a matter of personal prestige. Henry’s reputation for astuteness stood so high, not to speak of his credit for accumulated wealth, that the Courts of the continent paid England’s king an amount of respect which they would not have rendered to the power of England. ”

“ The eighth Henry chose ministers to create and carry out a policy for him, but always under his own control. The peculiarity of the Tudor genius, which he shared with his father and his daughter, lay in the unfailing skill with which they judged men, and their intuitive appreciation of popular feeling, which kept them from passing the bounds of acquiescence. ”

“ Their decision ranged against the king all who cared about preserving their property, as the Metropolitical visitation had ranged against him all who cared for religion in a distinctly Protestant form. Yet, even now, the Tudor monarchy had done its work too thoroughly, and had filled the minds of men too completely with the belief that armed resistance to a king was unjustifiable, to make Englishmen ripe for rebellion. ”

“ Their son was Richard duke of York who won the first battle of Saint Albans, and came near seizing the crown. His son Edward IV. did seize it. He married that charming widow Lady Grey daughter of Jaqueline of Luxembourg. (See Two Jaquelines.) The daughter of that marriage was Elizabeth Plantagenet who married Henry Tudor, Henry VII. It is there that Plantagenet becomes Tudor. Their daughter, Margaret Tudor married James Stuart, James IV. of Scotland, and it is there that Tudor becomes Stuart. ”

“ It is a pleasing speculation to conceive that, if some character other than a Tudor had been upon the throne, not all at least of this national inheritance would have been dissipated. One can imagine a character—tenacious, pure, narrow and subtle, intent upon dignity, and with a natural suspicion of rivals—which might have saved some part of the estates for posterity. ”

“ It reft into fragments the confederated ranks of a powerful territorial aristocracy, which had hitherto bid defiance to the king, however popular, however energetic." [3]
When Henry VIII. succeeded, although every sign of growing power was eagerly watched and speedily and effectually checked, there was little that the crown had to fear from the hitherto powerful nobility. Thus the position and authority of the Tudor monarchs was altogether different from that of their predecessors, and the Royal Supremacy passed from a theory into a fact. ”

“ The day of government by the aristocracy had passed for ever to be succeeded by the rule of the people, but in the interval between the sinking of one and the rise of the other Tudor absolutism was established firmly in England. In selecting his ministers Henry VII. passed over the nobles in favour of the middle classes, which were gaining ground rapidly in the country, but which had not yet realised their strength as they did later in the days of the Stuarts. ”

“ The old nobility were almost wiped out by the civil wars; generation after generation, their representatives had either fallen on the battlefield, or lost their heads on the scaffold and their lands by attainder. The new nobility were the creations of the Tudor Kings, lacking the prestige of renowned ancestry and the means of converting retainers into small armies. With the exception of the Howards, scarce one of the prominent statesmen of the period belonged to any of the old powerful families. For more than forty years the chief ministers were ecclesiastics ”

“ The government of Henry the Seventh, of his son, and of his grandchildren was, on the whole, more arbitrary than that of the Plantagenets. Personal character may in some degree explain the difference; for courage and force of will were common to all the men and women of the House of Tudor. They exercised their power during a period of a hundred and twenty years, always with vigour, often with violence, sometimes with cruelty. ”

“ There was no talk in all England but of the new baby, Edward Tudor, Prince of Wales, who lay lapped in silks and satins, unconscious of all this fuss, and not knowing that great lords and ladies were tending him and watching over him—and not caring, either. ”

“ In such a combination of circumstances—nascent oligarchy, but the prince worshipped—you get, holding the position of prince, Henry VIII., a thorough Tudor, that is, a man weak almost to the point of irresponsibility where his passions were concerned; violent from that fundamental weakness which, in the absence of opposition, ruins things as effectively as any strength.
No executive power in Europe was less in sympathy with the revolt against civilization than was the Tudor family. ”